Judge Jones — plenary speaker at scientific meeting

ID is dead and has been defeated by real science. But if so, why is Judge John E. Jones III the plenary speaker at the big Botany & Plant Biology Joint Congress this summer (see below)? Could it be that the scientists at this meeting have failed to defeat ID on scientific grounds and thus are looking to do it in on legal and political grounds?

Plenary Speaker
Judge John E. Jones III
Plenary Address Sunday, July 8, 7:30 pm
Title & Location to be Announced

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In 2005 Judge Jones presided over the
landmark case of Kitzmiller v. Dover School
District, after which he held that it was
unconstitutional to teach intelligent design
within a public school science curriculum.

If they didn’t have ID they’d have to invent it. The basic problem isn’t that they can’t defeat ID on scientific grounds. No. The problem is they can’t support NeoDarwinian theory on scientific grounds and are thus looking to do it on legal and political grounds. ID is being used as a distraction i.e. “Nevermind all the contrary evidence piling up that makes NDE look like Ptolemaic astronomy. The alternative is intelligent design and they’re trying to teach it to the children. THE CHILDREN!”

Exactly. By conflating all alternatives to NDE with a violation of the establishment clause, whatever shortcomings there may be with NDE can simply be ignored. Thus NDE becomes the “best” theory simply because no other theory is ever allowed.

I think this is true. But I wonder if the fight between creation science and evolution isn’t partially to blame. People get innoculated to arguments against evolution if they are convinced that a few are wrong or biased, and then it takes a lot more effort to get people to listen to other arguments. I don’t mean to blame creation scientists, only to point out that some people have used failing arguments in the past, and that has led to a mental innoculation of some.

In 2005 Judge Jones presided over the landmark case of Kitzmiller v. Dover School District, after which he held that it was
unconstitutional to teach intelligent design
within a public school science curriculum.

Why do people keep saying that when the facts show that ID was never set to be taught within a PS science curriculum?

As for “landmark” I predict that history will show it as nothing more than a footnote…

Ok — even I think it’s idiotic for a federal trial judge to be a plenary speaker at a botany and plant biology conference. Maybe he’s going to talk about caring for potted plants in the courtroom or something.

Something more recent from Corner? Delighted to oblige. Here are a few quotes from his Life of Plants (page numbers are from the 1968 Mentor Books paperback edition).

“Already in the comparatively simple environment of the comparatively simple oceanic plant life there has been parallel and recurrent evolution. Different groups of flagellates have evolved at different times into similar but genetically different plant cells as the termination of planktonic evolution. So, in the next stage, we shall find that radically different plant cells have evolved into similar seaweeds through parallel and recurrent evolution in their environments, and radically different seaweeds have been modified in parallel recurrence into trees. We speak of a plant kingdom, as if all plants had one origin, but the kingdom now is a series of parallel lines of plants. If they diverged from a common ancestor, it must have been a very early pre-Cambrian flagellate”
(p. 45)

“First efforts to classify plants are always artificial. Later, when more has been learnt about them, the classification is reshaped, and this reshaping goes on in continual refinement as the plants are better understood. It gradually becomes possible to assemble them in groups of increasing and fundamental likeness, not according to their superficial similarities. The ideal is classification by ancestral descent, but this can only be estimated from the true likeness of what plants are known; most are extinct and have become unknown. Nevertheless, on the principle that like begets like, the artificial are rearranged into what are called natural classifications.”
(p. 53)

For the sake of those who would pursue this most complicated subject, I give the following account of the main steps in seed evolutionÃ¢â‚¬Â¦”
(p. 187)

Every detail of their construction, from vestigial aril to stomata on the upper surface of the leaf and air tubes on the root, points to the origin of water lilies as land plants that grew in air, though their roots may have been in the marshy edges of the forest. The habit is retained in part by the Chinese lotus Nelumbium. But water-lilies happen to show well what has been the origin of other fresh water aquatics.
(p. 282-282)